A Place to Stand

Comments from Scotland on politics, technology & all related matters (ie everything)/"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."Henry Louis Mencken....WARNING - THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS HAVE DECIDED THAT THIS BLOG IS LIKELY TO BE MISTAKEN FOR AN OFFICIAL PARTY SITE (no really, unanimous decision) I PROMISE IT ISN'T SO ENTER FREELY & OF YOUR OWN WILL

Friday, May 06, 2005

Election

Kilroy got under 3,000. Ha Ha.

4.29 Labour have got their 324th seat which gives them a majority. The most interesting one left is Tower Hamlets which was leaked by a labourite as a success for george Galloway. Clearly there are repeated recounts going on & I hope Galloway makes it- he may 4.33 Galloway has done it - he may be slippery & somewhat silly but he isn't a war criminal & he isn't a mass murderer. His acceptance speech referred to the "corrupt political culture" that had been stuffing ballots.

I'll do more on these results later. At first site it looks like Labour have the majority the Beeb predicted plus a few but on 37% of the vote. In Scotland they got 39.5% & the Lib Dems are in 2nd place both in seats & more importantly, votes, for the first time since LLoyd George. The Tory vote seems to be only a bit over 30% which is pretty disasterous. We will have to see later how many of the postal votes were trustworthy.Good Night

Election

1.32 Gordon Brown being interviewed - I have never before seen him looking as happy as he does now. What he needs is a Labour win but with enough losses to prove that Blair is a liability & enough Blairite MPs are gone & to say that it was only his management of the campiagn that did it. That is a grin.

1.40 Mohammed Sarwar has said that when he wins he & all the other candidates will not appear on the platform because the BNP candidate is allowed there - also that the BNP were excluded from all hustings meetings. This is quite improper - democracy requires the freedom of speech of everybody, nobody objects to freedom of speech of those they like.

1.45 Alan Millburn says he won't serve in the next cabinet. I doubt if this will remove Brown's grin.

ELECTION

1.01PM The Beeb started with an exit poll of calling for a majority of 66 & only 2 more seats for the Lib Dems.

However it looks like in seats where the Lib Dems are contenders against Labour they are doing considerably better. Indies generally are doing fairly well except for UKIP who have disappeared. The SNP are not doing well, particularly compared to the LibDems. It is claimed Lab are going to lose a safe Welsh seat to anti-war labour. My bet will be Lab majority in the high 30s.

Wednesday, May 04, 2005

THERE IS AN ELECTION ON

I am not going to advise anybody how to vote - why on earth should you listen & anyway there is no choice I can unreservedly support.

I intend to vote SNP. I don't favour independence & I think their anti-nuclear policy is literally insane (but as it is everybody else's policy that is no barrier). I do VERY strongly support their growth policy & Alex Salmond was the only leader to oppose illegal war when illegal wars were relatively popular.

The Lib Dems do not appear to me to be economically liberal, at least in Scotland tho' in England Vince Cable is fairly sensible. As everybody knows they favour PR, which I think an absolute requirement for a competently run country, & a federal Britain which I want. They are against the current illegality but, as Yugoslavia proved, not against criminality, or even genocide when the EU supports it. Except for "green threads", the EU, a large state sector, nannying, & the use of socialist buzzwords like "inclusion" & "affordable housing" as a substitute for thought I do not know what they stand for. This does not seem to fit the definition of liberalism.

The Tories have not much to offer. Howard is clearly an out & out chancer - his policy on war (he favours it, blames Blair for it, trusts the enquiry, then doesn't,would have told Parliament the truth, claims Parliament might still have gone to war, says the AG's report, which includes the fact that regime change is not a legal justification, & says he would go to war on the basis of regime change).He is a twisty turny thing. On the economy the Tories offer nothing radical merely a slight, useful as far as it goes, finessing of Labour. To prove how very conservative they are they still oppose a democratic electoral system because FPTP once worked for them, despite the fact that their only hope of power lies in working within a proportional system. In Scotland they prove themselves irrelevant by continuing to support a system that would completely wipe them out again. Mind you I met their candidate - I liked him - a civil engineer, which always suggests competence. He didn't think they have a chance either.

Labour, as well as being genocidal murderers, are running a corrupt, jobs for the boys regime. They have been lucky to receive a growing economy & by handing over financial control to the Bank of England, have not screwed up to badly but the underlying indicators of competitiveness, debt & imports have been getting ever worse. The fact that they get away with saying how well the economy is doing (abysmally compared to Ireland, China, Russia, India, even the USA) shows how low everybody else's standard is.

The SSP are children, who, from time to time threaten to throw their toys out of the pram. They have absolutely nothing to contribute. Marx, than whom no political philosopher had greater respect for economic progress, must be spinning in his grave.

The Greens are like the SSP (even to the extent of their false Marxism) except that their toys are medieval ones. A Green regime would not compare favourably with medieval serfdom.